For several months, the creators of the cult TV series Game of Thrones have been thrilling fans with details about the third episode of the show's final season, which they claim was the biggest and longest battle in movie history. But after the episode aired, the internet was flooded with angry and frustrated fans. The battle, in their opinion, turned out to be too dark and chaotic, while the creators claim that the visual darkness throughout the episode was intended. A huge number of viewers are upset that they were not able to properly see what was happening on the screen.
So what went wrong? Did the show's creators really make an unprecedented mistake? Or has modern streaming technology and old TVs turned a monstrously dark and intense battle into a dance of shadows and artifacts?
The Long Night is one of the most anticipated television events of the last decade. The episode was the culmination of years of intertwining Game of Thrones storylines, culminating in a massive battle between a zombie army and a scattered coalition of humans. The Long Night was originally intended to be dark, both figuratively and literally. The whole essence of the famous phrase "Winter is coming" was shown in one long, dark and painful battle. Winter is here and the army of the dead has literally brought darkness to the world of Westeros.
Fabian Wagner, the cinematographer behind this episode, has been actively defending his work since it aired. Wagner claims that the episode was consciously designed in dark colors, and emphasizes: "Everything that we wanted people to see is there."
Wagner's statement implies that a certain degree of chaos in the scenes is part of the aesthetic of the episode. There are certain parts of the battle where the viewer doesn't have to see clearly what's going on. Some film theorists have called this technique "chaotic cinema," a type of modern action filmmaking in which crisp visual coherence is sublimated by a kind of frenetic overload designed to convey a sense of overwhelming intensity.
When used correctly, this technique can lead to a truly immersive dynamic experience, but when not, it can leave you feeling frustrated with the ongoing visual frenzy. Considering how much criticism has come in response to the new episode, it's safe to assume that Game of Thrones has inadvertently taken the latter route. But how did it happen, given the experience of the team and the budget of the project?
In one of his interviews, Wagner claims that one of the problems may lie on the side of viewers watching the episode on poorly calibrated televisions in brightly lit rooms. "The big problem is that a lot of people don't know how to properly set up their TVs," says Wagner.
And to some extent, he is certainly right. There is no doubt that the team behind the series has edited and processed the video using the best equipment, including perhaps OLED displays, which have excellent brightness and contrast. In this way, the dark visuals that the authors saw in post-production, carefully thought out to the smallest detail, could turn into dirty shades of gray for an audience with old TVs and ordinary LCD displays.
However, even those with new, perfectly calibrated OLED displays may still be frustrated watching the third episode of Game of Thrones, as the problem really comes down not so much to the capabilities of the screens, but to the limits of video compression technology and how video content delivered to the majority of viewers.
All television transmissions are compressed to some degree, whether you're watching cable, satellite, or streaming over the Internet. Many of today's films and TV shows are shot using 8K cameras, and the subsequent post-production processing achieves extremely high image clarity. The moment the final master file is created, some compression will inevitably be applied, depending on what the final video format is.
2K DCP files that play in theaters end up weighing around 150 gigabytes for a 90-minute movie. And even this is the result of compressing the original file, which potentially exceeded a terabyte. But when it comes to the streaming world, we rely on even stronger compression. After all, not many people have a wide enough internet bandwidth to download gigabytes per minute without constant buffering.
For the most part, streaming compression technology works very well. For example, David Attenborough's latest amazing nature documentary " co-produced with Netflix looks great and is probably compressed to just a few gigabytes. One of the biggest problems that compression technologies still can't solve is how to accurately encode dark or poorly lit frames. Minor changes in hue play a significant role in them, and the more an image is compressed, the more nuance of the gradients is erased, resulting in artifacts often called color banding.
"Long Night" is a perfect storm of all kinds of visuals, the least suitable for compression. When a greyish-blue mist permeates the dark battlefield, the scene simply turns into a rambling two-tone mess. Uncompressed to post-production, the scene may well have been incredible and memorable, but for most viewers watching it from home, it was out of reach.
In a statement, HBO (Home Box Office) claims that there were no problems on any of its platforms from which the new episode was broadcast. This means that the episode aired without any problems. On the other hand, James Willcox of Consumer Reports seems to strongly disagree. Willcox notes that the video quality when streaming the episode over the Internet was terrible, and the quality still left a lot to be desired even on cable and satellite platforms. He suggests that the fundamental problem arose when the episode was encoded or compressed.
"So either HBO messed up the episode during the encoding phase, or there isn't enough bandwidth to stream the episode without losing bit detail in dark images," Wilcox says in a comment to Motherboard. βYou donβt really notice it in bright scenes. I was able to watch the episode on an OLED TV that handles blacks better, and even on that the problem persists. It's not TV technology."
It seems that the Game of Thrones has thrown a real challenge to existing technology. The production team certainly made a bold creative choice in filming this epic battle in the dark, and the episode would not have aired if she wasn't satisfied with the outcome of her work. But due to the unexpected limitations of our current broadcast and streaming technologies, this episode ended up leaving many fans frustrated and dissatisfied. Now fans of the series will have to wait for the release of the episode in Blu-ray quality in the hope of seeing this exciting episode as it was intended. Perhaps this is also a reason to think that the era of Blu-Ray discs has not yet come to its logical decline, since there is simply no better solution to compression problems yet.